Happy Independence Day

Here's another video y'all should see. It's Ronald Reagan's 1986 Independence Day speech.

Enjoy.

Another Video You Should See

Wow. American Life really sucks these days. The economy's in the crapper, money's hard to come by and those we elect to do our bidding in Washington could care less about us as long as they have their power and money.

*Sigh*

But before you draw a warm bath and get out the razor blade, listen to Bill Whittle's latest offering: Get to Work. I may have to watch this first thing every day.

On a partially related note, I have some friends who are decidedly Democrat who occasionally post something from some loopy leftard sites on my Facebook page. Since I consider myself fairly well read on current events, it's not hard to refute them. As since I like having friends, I never rebuff them directly, but do rebuff the outrageous articles they post from places like Media Matters for America, Mother Jones and the like.

It has become great sport for me. I hope all 16 of you have a similar pastime.

h/t to Bad Blue and Gates of Vienna

Another Video You Should See - Your Government: Legislation

Here at the editorial desk of Everything is Backwards, our staff has the task to not only observe the many ways in which everything is backwards, but to also offer solutions.

Simplicity is the motto. Basically, you fix things, particularly governmental-type things, by doing the opposite of what's being done today. Let's say you observe that legislation is filled with unfamiliar phrases, unclear concepts and wrong assumptions about human nature. As a result, you have little understanding of the meaning of a law that you are required to abide by. No doubt you've heard of your responsibility as a citizen to obey all the laws, perhaps in person by a judge - "Ignorance of the law is no excuse."

Hmm. One wonders, Your Honor, how much time should be spent familiarizing oneself with the law, especially when just one piece of legislation number some 2000 pages and is written in a language that would be at home in an archeological dig, so removed is it from everyday linguistics, logic, and concepts. How about a law that merely opens the door for bureaucrats to write more law on the fly and transmogrifies two thousand pages into more than ten thousand pages?

Now imagine this being done every day.

One grossly misunderstood aspect of our unique form of government is that it's pretty much the exact opposite of all governments that came before it. In those other places, the government gave you permission to do something. Everything was prohibited unless you were given dispensation by the authorities. The government owned everything and if you were a good little subject, it just might let you live as you pleased, especially if you were its friend (or a relative).

The basis of American Exceptionalism is this concept, except backwards: we are free to live as we please unless there is a law, rule, or regulation that says otherwise. It's an unwritten rule, sorta.

Now, this doesn't mean that our leaders will always abide by it. Many in our own government don't seem to understand this simple concept and pat themselves on the back and claim that they're doing one helluva job in Washington because they're up there passing laws. If they truly held the notion of freedom in their heart, they'd be passing far fewer laws.

What they'd really do if they were genuinely interested in their fellow citizens and their God-given right to live freely, would be to review existing laws to see if they're still needed, and to repeal them if they weren't. This would also go for regulatory agencies.

An even better thing to do would be to include a sunset provision in each and every law that would require it to be re-enacted after, say, five years.

So, here's today's lesson, gentle readers: More laws = less freedom.

And, laws should be written clearly, in plain English. Most of today's laws are written by a cross between a lawyer and the Godfather: you get an offer you can't understand.

This is done on purpose. Heaven forfend that a law be written so that it can be easily understood by everyone. Who then would we pay to decipher it? How else would we know what to do to live in accordance to the law but pay a lawyer? What would our Supreme Court do?

Oh well, maybe one day we'll set everything right and get back to having some common sense in Washington.

Until then, here's Bill Whittle, our Virtual President, to expand on this idea. Enjoy.

 

 

 

Reid: Tea Party Equals Anarchy. Harry, You Couldn't Be More Wrong

Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D - NV), in a startling display of ignorance, attempted to label the Tea Party as "anarchists." He criticized the new class of senators, who were sent to Washington to stop the extreme leftward lurch this administration is taking against the will of the people in defiance of the Constitution.

“People who don’t believe in government — and that’s what the Tea Party is all about — are winning, and that’s a shame.”

This is a gross mischaracterization of the movement. Perhaps someone in a position to do so will make sure this article finds its way to Mr. Reid, for he is in dire need of correction.

The Tea Party is not a group of anarchists. It believes in government because there can be no civil peaceful society without it. What it doesn't believe in is a Progressive form of government where the basic law of the land, our Constitution, is ignored or misread. It doesn't believe, as Mr. Reid apparently does, that government should be so large, so intrusive and so expensive that it begins to have a deleterious effect on the everyday life of Americans.

It doesn't believe that government has the right to snoop on emails or telephone calls of innocent citizens without probable cause presented before a judge.

It doesn't believe that the IRS should discriminate against conservative political action groups in order to affect the outcome of a national election.

It doesn't believe that the government should be powerful enough to shut down or take over entire sectors of the economy as we are seeing with the destruction of the coal industry and the takeover of the health care and student loan industries.

It doesn't believe that government should be able to issue tens of thousands of pages of onerous regulations to "solve" a fabricated environmental "crisis" that has cost trillions in lost wages, lost productivity and lost careers.

It doesn't believe that government should treat some citizens differently than others.

It doesn't believe there should be open borders.

It doesn't believe that schoolchildren should be indoctrinated into radical, far-left, anti-American thought.

It doesn't believe that law should be passed before we know what is in it.

It's not that the Tea Party doesn't believe in government, Mr. Reid. It's that it doesn't believe in your Progressive vision of it.

An Interesting and Informative Cartoon

I've been meaning to post this gem for a while. Enjoy.

 

 

 

As usual, you're invited to poke around in the archives. Oh, and you can click on any of the other links in the sidebar, some of them are friends and would welcome the hits.

George Soros Raids Coven for New Succubus

Your favorite anti-Christ and mine, George Soros is getting married again.

His fiancee might want to talk to this previous Soros girlfiend. You know, the one he assaulted and who is now suing him for a cool $50M.

Just a little girl talk...

The 112th Congress is the Least Productive in Years – Thank Goodness!

Kathleen Hennessey, reporterette for the LA Times, penned this little piece over the weekend. She thinks that Congress is falling down on the job by not being “productive.”

She actually tries to makes it sound like a bad thing…

The 112th Congress is on pace to be one of the least productive in recent memory — as measured by votes taken, bills made into laws, nominees approved. By most of those metrics, this crowd is underperforming even the "do-nothing Congress" of 1948, as Harry Truman dubbed it. The hot-temper era of Clinton impeachment in the 1990s saw more bills become law.

She goes on to say this –

Experts cite the rise of a brand of conservatism that aims for a government that governs least.

Um, Katy, that’s not “a brand of conservatism,” that is conservatism in its purest form.

It’s clear from her article that Hennessey, like many others, doesn’t understand the very simple founding principle of our government: we are free unless there is a law that specifically prevents a certain action. This is what our current Commander-in-Chief meant when he called our Constitution a document of “negative liberties.”

From the American Thinker link,

…Government does some things which reduce our private rights and yet which increase the common good. Politics is all about where the boundary between broad notions of promoting the general welfare by state coercion and preserving liberty should be. Politicians on the Left have often argued that liberty should be reined in more tightly so that "the people" can live better. But implying that more state power somehow increases liberty is beyond mere Leftism. It is entry into that dead realm of [Orwellian] Newspeak in which language is pureed into nonsense, and then nonsense is presented as argument.

Now this may not seem very important on the surface, but it’s the main reason why we’re staggering under the weight of unprecedented intrusion into our daily lives from the federal government. Soon, we won’t be able to purchase 100-watt incandescent light bulbs. Traditional propellants used in aerosol cans have been outlawed, forcing much more expensive alternatives to be used. Asthma inhalers have more than doubled in price as a result, making formerly affordable relief difficult or even impossible for many. Gasoline is now blended with ethanol, which is less efficient and results in poorer gas mileage and damage to older fuel systems, again the product of legislation from Capitol Hill. Additionally, the seasonal formulations required for gas adds to the price we pay at the pump.

There are many more examples, but the trend is alarmingly clear: we are allowing those we send to Washington to legislate our freedom away at a frightening pace. Much of the reason for the increased price of consumer goods today is the direct result of misguided laws enacted by zealous representatives in Washington who think they are doing the people’s will by enacting as many laws as possible.

This is the primary reason why Obama and the Left received such a “shellacking” in the 2010 midterm elections. It signaled an awakening of we the people to the dangers of a far-too-large federal government and the desire to stop the rampant trampling of our freedom by Progressives in Congress.

So, what the Left sees as a failure, conservatives rightly see as a victory. Slowing the rate at which we’re losing our freedom should be cause for celebration, not derision.

Hennessey’s article reveals quite a bit about the Leftist mindset, that government should be the sole dispenser of the rights of a people in direct contradiction to the intent of our Founders, namely that our freedom is inherent in our existence, given from God at birth, intended to be preserved by representatives who refrain from enacting laws which, under our form of government, rob us of that freedom.

This is the revolution that our forebears fought and died for. A new way of living, a first for mankind, beginning with the idea that man was naturally free, that freedom was no longer the benevolent allowance of an all-powerful monarch, to be dispensed as a reward for fealty to the king.

In other words, less is indeed more when it comes to our form of government. Less laws equal more freedom.

The Internet’s Free Flow of Information and How Congress Wants to Stop It

Somebody in Washington missed the memo.

It was sent sometime last November. It said that we wanted less government intrusion into our daily lives.

However, it seems that business as usual has resumed.

The recent events in Egypt should awaken us to the dangers of governmental control of the Internet. As in Iran last year, their government has shut down Internet access, including Twitter accounts, and even disrupted cell phone service in an effort to quell the popular uprisings there. It’s an attempt by what we see as corrupt leaders in a foreign land suppressing the rights of the people.

We think because we’re America that It. Can’t. Happen. Here.

Really?

What if I told you that President Obama has been seeking that very power since 2009? And that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has introduced SR 21 that currently contains vague language about national security, to be replaced with something more definitive later, that would give President Obama that power?

It gets better. Rep. James Sensenbrenner has introduced another bill that would require Internet Service Providers to retain information on your comings and goings for two years even though you’ve done nothing wrong. Naturally, FBI Director Robert Mueller is in favor of this bill, saying that it would be "tremendously helpful in giving us a historic basis to make a case" in investigations. I’m all for that, too, as long as you have a search warrant from a judge who has reviewed the evidence. But if you don’t have one, then you don’t have a legal basis to know what anyone is doing on the Internet.

The memo they missed also contained something about sticking to that thing called the Constitution. However, judging by this news, they have yet to even check their in-box. They’re still making up the rules as they go along, seemingly blissfully unaware that they have rules they have to follow. Old rules like the Fourth Amendment. Old rules that until recently were scrupulously adhered to in order to keep us free from government suppression.

Hopefully, we’re starting to wake up to the sad fact that we are reaching parity with other governments around the world, just as our President has wished. In the past, we could take refuge in the fact that America really was different from the rest of the world, that our freedoms could never be taken away or diminished.

Today, we see this is no longer the case. In fact, Washington seems hell-bent on a fundamental transformation that reduces our nation to nothing more than a banana republic, with a strong-armed leader rewarding his friends and punishing his enemies.

We used to be better than this. We used to have representatives who were like our neighbors, who had the same values that we had, and would govern according what was best for the majority of Americans. Our country was designed to be owned and operated by the people, not by career politicians.

I miss the old days.

By not reading the clear message that was sent by us last November to get government out of our lives, we feel like we’ve been unfriended. Even worse, our former BFF’s don’t even want us to log on anymore.

If our representatives ever check their email again, they’ll find this somewhat shorter version of the original memo: We want representatives who will slay the Leviathan, not feed it.

Why Our Economy Sucks – Congress Makes Highest Number of Laws Since 1960’s

Succinct, that’s how this Bloomberg article puts it. “The 111th Congress made more law affecting more Americans since the “Great Society” legislation of the 1960s.”

Thanks a lot.

In order for this story to have its full effect (that is, to pour yourself a stiff drink even if it is 9 a.m.), you only need to understand one principle; we are free to do anything unless there’s a law specifically preventing it. This simple concept is the heart and soul of American exceptionalism. Other countries need permission from their governments to do something, placing them in a far different position than us. They are restricted from the beginning whereas we start from the premise of freedom.

It’s also curious that this little nugget of information, as important as it is, isn’t as widely known as it should be. If it was, I’m certain that there would be much more discontent with the current political atmosphere in Washington. Not that there isn’t already, as demonstrated by the loss of the House to Republican control in the last election.

Still, this is terrible news for freedom-loving Americans. It also explains why our economy has ground to a halt. It’s clear that Congress is legislating us to death.

I should probably introduce another principle for to help you understand how this is bad for the country. This is the principle of cause and effect. Allow me to explain.

Things don’t just happen spontaneously; they have an origin, a cause. After the cause has occurred, the result is the effect. Also, understand that the effect can then become another cause.

In the engineering world, when there is a failure, you want to know what caused it in order to prevent another failure. This is known as Root Cause Analysis.

In our situation, we have legislators creating law, which, by definition, restrict our actions, resulting in less freedom. Is it any wonder that we find ourselves in an economic morass, with record high levels of unemployment and poverty? The cause is too many laws, the effect is economic devastation.

Again, thanks a lot, Nancy, Harry, and Barack. Heckuva job you’ve done there.

Now that we know what caused our problems, we can start to solve them. We can roll back the new laws by any means available to us in this new Congress, be it the filibuster, defunding or repeal. However, repeal of any new law will be highly unlikely with this president. But brace yourself, Effie, there will be howls from the Democrats and those on the left (but I repeat myself) who somehow think they’re doing the will of the people by passing laws at a record pace. What they’re really doing is reducing our freedom, just as hard and as fast as they can.

Let them howl. Let them scream until their voices give out, then, when we can no longer hear their bleating, tell them that their efforts to constrict our lives has failed and they can go back to wherever it is they came from and take their power-mad ways with them.

We will be free once more.

What Grand Idea Is This?

What grand idea is this, that we should be free? That we should govern ourselves and our affairs best to our liking and desires, relying our our instincts, our intellect and our conscience. That we should live in harmony with others free, unbound by useless rules made up by some distant person who knows not of our lives, nor our families, nor our dreams and desires, and certainly not our hopes.

What grand idea is this, that we should unite as free souls and govern ourselves as we choose? That we should gather, talk, decide which path is best to walk, then choose those who represent our wishes to act as we would act in their stead, embracing our values of freedom and liberty, to govern in a manner most pleasing to us. That these people be our friends and neighbors, knowing us as people to be honored and obeyed, much as in marriage, for it is a union we seek. A union with others of like mind, seeing that power is held in restraint until needed, not to be abused nor turned toward a populace, but to defend the values that are deeply held against those who wish otherwise, namely tyranny and oppression.

What grand idea is this, that we should show to the world what wonders are possible to a free people? That we should toil and sweat and provide for ourselves and our families that which is most pleasant to them and us, at the same time by our example, showing others in the world how to best conduct the affairs of man with malice toward none save those who would deprive us of our rights as freemen. That governance of self is done with restraint and vigilance, placing first the innocence of liberty such as a doctor, to do no harm. To shine as a light to the downtrodden and defeated, that any who should desire the slavery of their peoples be shown as the wicked they are, separate from God's gentle instruction to love others as ourselves.

What grand idea is this that we should ourselves fall into the clutches of our enemies and find them in our midst? For if they do not love freedom, liberty and the loving kindness that supports these things, they should be encouraged not to change a people, but to change themselves. Failing that, they should encourage the thought of seeking out a like minded people in travel, some place where their views are more widely held, enshrined in some foreign land, finding there the solace for their tortured views. We wish not their demise, we seek instead to be free to pursue those things we deem pleasing, unfettered by those who wish not upon themselves the blessings and responsibilities of freedom.

What grand idea is this, that we should from time to time renew these things that make us who we are? An honest examination, that we remain true to ourselves, our God, and our families, measured by those values handed down to us from our forefathers and those who have fought and died for our freedoms, that we should not be found wanting nor wandering.

That freedom never perish, for its' fate is uncertain. That all times, we make our efforts known to the world, that we wish only for ourselves and others, peace and liberty, for the two are inseparable, bound in Heaven by God intended for a just and honest people, unafraid and steadfast in their belief of freedom and liberty.

What grand idea is this, that we should be free?